Meanwhile, in the hallway at some unnamed high school in Beverly Hills, Drew is complaining to Gordon about how they were forced into being Galactic Sentinels (even though she was super stoked about it last episode). Seeing this, Laurie immediately comes over and joins their discussion (even though the last episode ended with them agreeing not to talk or hang out at school). The trio get into a brief debate on the merits of conformity versus individuality and tradition versus discontentment and rebellion. This leads into Drew calling Gordon a "wuss" who always follows the rules, no matter what, and gives in to peer pressure.
And then Gordon seems to remember he left the oven on.
Back on Moleculon again, Gorganus finally decides on which mercenary alien monster to use to destroy the Galactic Sentinels - a brain-themed creature called Neuragula. As he summons the poorly-made model of the creature from his dry ice machine, a loud roar echoes through the throne room and drives his pet minion Lechner crazy. Apparently the primary attack of this brain-themed monster is that he screams really loudly, which makes me think he should've been some kind of punk rock monster instead. Maybe it'd make sense if it were some sort of telepathic attack, but that idea evidently never occurred to the writers.
After school, Drew and Laurie run into each other at the coffee house, where Drew apparently works as a waitress. She's unimpressed to find out Laurie is the president of both the school's student council and the National Honor Society, claiming, when Laurie goes out of earshot, that she "doesn't have a clue." I'm starting to think Drew is less of a pseudo-intellectual rebel and more just kind of a bitch.
Once Laurie leaves, Gordon appears and approaches Drew, still troubled by their earlier debate. He insists she's wrong about him, and that he only acts the way he does because it's objectively the right way to act. He also counters that Drew is "a regular non-conformist cliché." While that's an entirely accurate statement, the fact that he is equally clichéd is apparently lost on him.
In a bit that admittedly made me chuckle, Swinton arrives in the coffee house and Drew assures Gordon that he's down with the whole act of pretending not to know one another and won't come over - which is naturally immediately followed by Swinton making a beeline for them and asking if they're talking about being superheroes. After a brief and uneventful conversation in which he manages to insult Swinton twice, Gordon's "electronic date book" beeps and he leaves.
Presumably to go buy more pink shirts and striped suspenders.
Later on, Laurie returns and asks Swinton to deliver a book to Gordon for her since she's too busy. Swinton is flattered just by being asked to do a favor for Laurie, which gets Drew's panties in a bunch again. Suddenly devious inspiration strikes! Picking up a piece of paper Laurie left behind for... some reason... Drew declares that if she could copy Laurie's handwriting she could use it to prove Gordon is "a slave to peer pressure." Swinton excitedly offers to help by scanning the paper into his computer and using it to "generate" a note replicating the handwriting, apparently with the custom program he made to fake a doctor's note to get out of gym class.
Drew dictates the note to Swinton as such: "To the man I most admire - while I've always thought of you as rigid, uptight, and a rule-follower, I now realize you'd break loose and forget the rules to be at my side if you knew I needed you."
To be honest, I don't understand how this is supposed to prove Drew's point. The note isn't really asking him to do anything, so there's not really any peer pressure involved. And if he were to disregard the rules to impress Laurie, as the note implies, that would actually prove Drew WRONG about him always toeing the line. At best, Drew is just using the "proving a point" smokescreen to mess with Gordon for fun. More likely, the writers just didn't think this through at all.
To be honest, I don't understand how this is supposed to prove Drew's point. The note isn't really asking him to do anything, so there's not really any peer pressure involved. And if he were to disregard the rules to impress Laurie, as the note implies, that would actually prove Drew WRONG about him always toeing the line. At best, Drew is just using the "proving a point" smokescreen to mess with Gordon for fun. More likely, the writers just didn't think this through at all.
The next morning, Swinton delivers Laurie's book and the fake note to Gordon. Sure enough, Gordon falls for it, and when Laurie shows up to make sure he got the book he starts talking to her as if he's speaking to a little puppy. Before things can get too awkward, though, Laurie's tattoo flashes - and only Laurie's. Regardless, Gordon offers to come with her, saying he can break loose once in a while. Then a Power Portal opens right next to them, and the pair jump through into Nimbar's lair - leaving Swinton and Drew to wonder why they weren't summoned.
Sure, just put the magic space-time rip in the middle of the school hallway. No one will notice.
In his lair, Nimbar immediately asks Gordon why he bothered showing up. This, he explains, is only a reconnaissance mission, and only Laurie was required. As it turns out, Nimbar's monitors are malfunctioning due to a solar storm, and he can't be sure whether or not Gorganus has sent down a monster. He wants Laurie to go check out the area he got the reading from and see if it's a false positive. Nimbar allows Gordon to go along, but under strict instructions that they are to return immediately if they find a monster and not to start a fight without the full team. The pair transform and teleport to the same desert where they fought Ninjabot in the previous episode.
The two do a bunch of pointless cartwheels through the sand and find nothing, but just as they're about to leave, Neuragula appears and confronts them. Gordon - presumably in an attempt to impress Laurie - immediately launches himself into battle with the monster. Miraculously, Nimbar's holo-monitor interference clears up just in time for him to see this transgression.
Apparently Laurie and Gordon missed a full day of classes doing investigative gymnastics in the desert, because when we next see Drew and Swinton, it's at Drew's pool house after school. Swinton has brought over his friend Dwayne to loan Drew some video equipment for a project she's working on. Dwayne is an overweight, overacting, lisping, constantly-sneezing caricature of a nerd with taped-together glasses and everything, and I immediately hope he doesn't become a recurring character. During the conversation over the A/V equipment, our two remaining heroes' tattoos flash, and they make a quick excuse about running out to the market in order to get out of dodge.
Upon their arrival, Nimbar informs Swinton and Drew that Gordon broke a rule, much to their shock. Swinton tries to spill the beans about their nefarious note prank, but Drew interjects and stops him. The two transform and join the others in the battle against the brain beast, which hasn't been going very well without them. The quartet attempt to subdue him with more gym-kata, but Neuragula counters with sparky energy beams that, despite only being fired at their feet, force the Sentinels to retreat to Nimbar's lair.
He's got pretty nice abs for a walking exposed brain.
The teens ask Nimbar if they know how the monster has been "re-configured," and claim he's "twice as ugly as before," implying they've already fought him sometime between the previous episode and this one. Granted, it's not clear how much time has passed, so that's technically possible, but it's a pretty weird way to handle what should be the introduction of the show's second monster. They also comment on his painfully loud roaring, even though we haven't actually seen the monster use that in battle yet.
Nimbar explains that Neuragula "creates a harmonic sound weapon using both sides of its brain." This nonsense gives Swinton a brilliant idea. He surmises that they need to keep the left and right halves of Neuragula's brain from working together by tricking the logical hemisphere and the emotional hemisphere into behaving differently. They return to battle and enact this cunning strategy by... summoning their weapons and shooting the monster with lasers. When that doesn't work, they form Knightron and... shoot more lasers at it. And it works this time. For... some reason.
I'm thinking Neuragula just got tired of being on such a terrible show and gave up on life.
Gorganus explains he's opening a portal to bring back Neuragula, but we plainly see the monster explode into nothingness on-screen anyway because this episode wants to keep up its perfect record of immediately disregarding things the characters have just said. Back in Nimbar's lair, Drew and Swinton finally fess up to their ploy. Nimbar swiftly scolds them for putting the galaxy in jeopardy over some petty bullshit and sends the teens on their way.
That night, Drew puts on some sort of bizarre performance at the coffee house, which the other three come to see even though they're not supposed to be hanging out together in public. Gordon asks Drew for the fake note so he can tear it up, but Drew can't find it. In a truly Shyamalan-esque twist, it turns out Dwayne has the note, and thinks it came from Drew. The episode ends with him blowing her a kiss and the others laughing at her. As a final note, we never find out what Drew actually needed the A/V equipment for, making Dwayne's appearance completely pointless.
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Wow. I really wasn't expecting things to get so much worse than the already-awful first episode so quickly. Granted, Neuragula is a much better-designed monster than Ninjabot, but that's the only real positive I can give this episode. Dwayne is insufferable, all the characters but Laurie act like total jerks, and neither the civilian plot with the note nor the logistics of the monster battle make a lick of sense. Power Rangers can get pretty spectacularly bad, but, even having seen hundreds of episodes of that franchise, I legitimately cannot think of a single episode that lives down to the sheer lack of entertainment value "The Note" boasts. Going into this blog I had hoped that Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills would be so-bad-it's-good. If this is the level the rest of the series operates at, then it'll be a minor miracle if I can actually sit through 38 more episodes.
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